Your website may have all the qualities of a good web site – great graphics, good information, well optimized content and good navigability. But if your web site does not download quickly, what purpose would all these great traits serve?
A visitor’s attention span on the Web is of barely 3 seconds and if you can’t grab it within those few crucial seconds you are likely to lose the visitor (read potential customer) for good. You may have put in lots of razzle dazzle to make your web site appealing, but make sure the visitor actually gets to see at least some interesting glimpses of it within the first few seconds, if not all, to make her stay on. For this, your site needs to download quickly.
You can do the following to ensure that
* The HTML should be properly optimized without compromising on the quality. If this means ridding the HTML documents off any comments and superfluous linebreaks, so be it. But keep them in the source document for the purpose of maintaining the site.
* Keep the usage of file includes as low as possible by bundling several scripts into one file include.
* If there are several images in the website, use
* If your site carries third-party content, don’t be dependent on their servers. Rather use a script which picks up RSS feeds on local level. This will make you avoid delays because of DNS server delays.
* There should be definite dimensions for images and other related elements. This will make sure that pages containing those images will be rendered correctly without any “jumping around.”
* Keep the large scripts at the end of the document so that browser doesn’t get stuck into them before loading rest of the page, as it will if a large JavaScript is put in the head of the document.
This is not the exhaustive list of must dos to make your site download faster. To ensure that you get a website which is good in all respects such as design, programming, content, employ services of a professional yet affordable web site design and development company.
